Scarlet Guilt

“I should have read the warning label,” he said with a grimaced smile, bringing two fingers to his mouth as if inhaling a cigarette.

With a heart rate monitor calling down the time, the man lay in a hospital bed. Both wrists were taking in fluids from a drip hanging in suspension, and his wife Martha was across from him in a chair. The room was institutional green.

Martha stood and walked to the window. A drizzling gray rain. “Please don’t joke. Not now.”

Yes, a joke, he thought to himself. On both myself and this woman. This woman with flawless skin and celadon-green eyes. A woman who paints with her Irish red hair dappled in oils of whites and blues, lost in her own passion; who had come to him in ragged jeans and flowers in her hair, stepping out of a yellow Volkswagen bus — eyes the purest green he’d ever seen or would see — focused on him in the California sun.

His heart climbed and his adrenaline spiked, just to look at her. “I’m sorry. Come over here and sit by me.”

From the bare edge of the chair, she leaned toward him. “I woke this morning knowing you were going to be fine. Did I tell you? In the dream, we were older. There’s only one way you could be older, right?”

The man pressed his hand on top of hers. “Yes. That’s right. Your dreams always came true. Remember Matthew being a boy? You dreamt of a boy, didn’t you?”

“And it was a boy, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it a boy?”

Without saying a word, his eyes clenched shut and his fists tightened. As his knuckles turned white, he thought of the mountains.

The day was clear in the sun and he climbed the switchbacks. After pushing through a hard sweat, he came out of the green conifers, and then rose above the tree line into the brown rocked aridity. The snow-packed peaks stood in finite resolution. Higher, the air was cold, which ached on his chest, where scars lay from a motorcycle accident long ago when he was young.

As he hiked, and he didn’t know why, he thought about holding a highball glass in a dark paneled bar, eighteen-year scotch rolling in the ice. The bar was the same in New York, and Las Vegas, and Dallas. A trio playing light jazz. But I didn’t… I couldn’t… You stop right there. Your reasons are not really the point, are they? 

A nurse came in and asked permission to shave the man’s chest. He lowered his blue hospital gown off his shoulders and leaned back. The entirety of his torso lay in red-streaked scars against pale flesh, the scars running as rivulets through thick, crusted-over dead tissue. The nurse scanned the wounds, frozen.

“It’s hard to see, I know. The railroad tracks went straight, and I missed the turn”. 

After a deep breath, the nurse used a shaving brush to apply a white frothed cream in a circular motion. She then began scraping the hair with a straight razor, a practiced stroke.

Both the man and his wife diverted their eyes, his sliding as a wide-eyed appeal to the monitored-clad wall, hers finally looking back as a red-faced interloper of the intimacy of one human being shaving another. Fidgeting in the chair, her hands didn’t know where to be.

The nurse continued to shave the man. The only sounds were the heart rate monitor and a distant chatter from the nurse's station.

“You’re good at this, I can tell,” Martha said.

“Would you like to do it?”

Martha took the razor and steadied her shaking hand with the other. Holding the black precise instrument with the tips of her fingers, she slowly drew across the chest in quick sweeps, like using a trowel on her paintings. Where the hair lay against scars, she was careful to place the razor’s edge where she could guide the blade through the massive flaws. The hair fell away against the scraping edge and she wiped the blade on the towel again, and again.

You and Martha drank black coffee from white china cups at the kitchen table where real business is done. The fluorescent lights screamed down on you, a piercing shrill, and your hands gripped the edge of the formica. ‘I’ve been checked for AIDS,’ you said. ‘And.. and I'm sorry. There's no other way to say this. You'll also need to go in.’

Martha’s delicate cup shattered in her hand. She looked down surprised, her eyes curious like a small child, the palm oozing blood.

Later, you’d super glue the broken shards, her favorite, but the fine cracks meant the cup would never be the same, hidden in the high cupboard, never used.

The man stretched his head back. “You missed my throat.”

The nurse made a dry laugh as Martha teared up. Taking the razor, the nurse finished up with the towel. She then left abruptly, leaving the man and Martha alone.

Martha stood again at the window, where the fuming rain now lashed against the glass, the reflection streaking against her face. “I wish the rain would stop,” she said. “It smells like… like a fresh start, you know?”

The mountain trail steepened, and he used an ice axe to gain balance by driving it into the glacier. The trail veered hard away from the saddle between the peaks. Despite being surprised by the difficulty, he turned his sun-goggled glasses towards the summit, the cornice blowing snow triumphantly. But then the ice broke underfoot, a shuddered mournful sound, and he knew conditions weren’t perfect. He turned, post-holing down the deep snow, an overwhelming sense of nausea churning through his stomach. After a time, he stumbled under the unforgiving weight of his pack and fell to his knees vomiting blood, the scarlet spilling against the snow.

Soon the nurse returned with two aides and a rolling gurney. After removing the dripping lines from the syringe barrels, she twisted closed the fittings. With the gurney to the level of the bed, they moved the man with a ‘one, two, three’. Martha leaned in and kissed him. The aides rolled the man out the door into the wide hallway to the elevator and the nurse pressed the button. They waited. The younger of the two aides dressed in all white checked his watch. He tapped the face with the nail of his index finger, then brought the watch to his ear. In a short time, the elevator door slid open and they entered.